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About Rounak Jain

I have an ancient PC at home. It’s from the 2007-08 period. The processor is a some dual core outdated, stone-age one. The motherboard is something from Lenovo Thinkcentre range with onboard SiS Mirage 3 graphics. The RAM is a 2 GB DDR2 333 MHz stick. The monitor is quite decent though, apart from other peripherals. There’s an 80 GB Hitachi hard disk, helped by a 1 TB Western Digital My Passport Ultra external hard disk.

I’m honestly surprised I could dual-boot it, throw Microsoft Office 2010 at it and play games like Counter Strike, let alone have a dozen tabs open in Google Chrome. The PC came with Windows XP. I upgraded first to Windows 7 and then to Windows 8. The dual-boot setup I have right now is a combination of Windows 7 and Windows 8.1.

Long story short, I needed an upgrade.

I began searching about building a PC. There are a ton of amazing, in-depth tutorials from Newegg, EasyPCBuilder etc. After spending days understanding how it’s all done, I started researching about the parts that I’d need. My requirements are:

Document editing

Lots of internet browsing

Media – music, photos and videos. I watch a lot of shows and movies

Moderate gaming – Counter Strike, Battlefield 4, CS: GO and some other titles I don’t know the names of. I don’t play games, my brother does

With those modest requirements in mind, I went about looking for reviews for different processors and motherboards, as those two will be the most important items I’ll need to purchase.

After having a dilemma between Intel Pentium G3258 and Core i3 4130, I was advised that although the G3258 is a lot cheaper, the Core i3 4130 will be a better choice in the long-term. I don’t want to keep upgrading often, so I decided i3 4130 will be a much wiser choice. I won’t dwell on the differences between the i3 and the G3258, but you can compare the two here.

I then realized there’s a refreshed version of i3 4130 called the i3 4150, part of the Haswell Refresh lineup. There’s not a lot of difference between the two, both features- and price-wise. I went ahead with the Core i3 4150.

Next up was the motherboard. There are a wide variety of options out there. Asus, Gigabyte, ASRock and even Intel if you’re feeling rich. The Core i3 4150 processor supports the FCLGA1150 socket, so I shortlisted Asus H81M-CS and the Gigabyte H81M-S1. I went ahead with the Asus for after-sales service options. You can pretty much choose any of the two, but Asus seemed better to me. It’s a bit pricier, but it’s the same thing as Gigabyte.

I needed RAM as well, seeing as the Asus motherboard and the i3 4150 both don’t support DDR2 sticks. I went with the Corsair Vengeance DDR3 4 GB, a single 4 GB stick. Using a single stick will save my costs if I want to increase it. The Asus H81M-CS motherboard comes with two channels for RAM.

Price: Cost me around Rs. 2300 after all discounts and cashbacks.

Hard disk: Not decided yet

I’m yet to finalize on this. I’m still wondering if I should reuse the old hard disk or get a new, more spacious one. I’ll update this post when I decide.

Price: NA

Case: Local purchase

I’ll be buying one locally. I need a microATX case.

Price: ~Rs. 1000

Monitor: Will be reusing the current monitor.

Peripherals: Mouse, keyboard, speakers etc, will be reused.

Total cost: Rs. 12,000

So far, all the purchases have cost me around Rs. 12,000. I got a great deal on the processor, motherboard and RAM. The case will cost around Rs. 1,000, which is included in the total cost. Local prices are not really good, plus sites like Snapdeal and Flipkart are running some really good cashback offers. Snapdeal is offering way lower prices with 7% auto-discounts. I was expecting the entire build to cost around Rs. 15000, but due to the cashback and discounts, the price came down by nearly 20%.

Next up will be the assembly. I can’t wait for the products to be delivered.

Reuters is reporting that the European Union could fine Microsoft for including Internet Explorer in its OS as the default browser.

Apparently, by making its own product as the default at first boot, Microsoft is being anti-competitive, and provoking the fine-friendly EU regulators.

Their logic? Internet Explorer is the default browser post the initial installation, so that edges out other browsers. Hey, it’s not like you can use Internet Explorer to download whatever browser you want.

Probably EU should also consider punishing Microsoft for not providing options to download OSs other than Windows during installation. You know, this pushes people to use Windows and other OSs suffer due to this.

Google is a crazy, amazing, awesome company. I love them. Partly because I love Android, and partly because Chrome browser on my Windows PC is one thing I prefer over most of the other things. That is, when it comes to consumption.

I’ve rarely had any annoyances with the browser, and I have shed some of my privacy concerns, even if forcibly so. Firefox is unusable, and I can’t stand the UI. Microsoft has worked hard and improved Internet Explorer, with the v10, but by that time, I was already a Chrome fan, and had my bookmarks and extensions synchronized with my Google account. That, and Chrome for Android sync, meant that I won’t be looking back and switching to any other browser. Not any time soon.

Moving on. Google has this idea of an OS based off of Chrome browser. That is to say, you’re connected to the internet at all times, and you live and work in the Chrome browser. And that most your data is stored in the cloud. Basically, you live and work in the cloud. That’s what is the thinking behind the entire concept of a Chromebook.

Google, however, announced the Chromebook Pixel yesterday. It comes with a price tag of $1300. There’s a retina-class touchscreen, an Intel i5 dual core processor, 4 gigs of RAM and… 32 GB of internal storage. To make up for it, the company is bundling 1 TB of Google Drive storage for 3 years.

So, why this insanity? I have a few theories –

Move to cloud. Encourage cloud storage usage. However, this makes as much sense as nothing. Local storage is important, necessary even in countries like the USA where there is very good internet connectivity with high speeds. And whatever are you going to do with all that 1 TB of space when you can only have about 20 GB usable (assuming you have to transfer your data from local media to the cloud)? It’s going to be very painful to make use of all that space.

Make data-mining more easier. By having only the Chrome browser as a means to do any work, or consume any media, Google is effectively getting access to everything you will do on a Chromebook. It wipes out middle-men and alternatives.

Bring attention to the concept of a Chromebook and Chrome OS. The Chromebook Pixel might bomb, but I don’t think Google is even thinking about it. It seems to have priced it so insanely, people will take notice. Some might dismiss it right away, but some people will start talking about Chromebooks. Even if they don’t buy the Chrome-running laptops. Start the chatter, some of them will buy the cheaper, $250-350 versions.

Like a fish out of water. Out of nowhere, Mr. Arindam Chaudhari of IIPM, got about 79 webpages blocked. All these pages were critical of his business, IIPM. Some of those were satirical posts, but the rest were highlighting their experience with the said institute. In India, everyone has freedom of speech, and everyone can rightly point out their experiences with any business, institute etc on the Internet.

So they did.

And it angered Mr. Arindam, driving him to conclude that it is hurting his business. And so he got those pages blocked. At some point of time, he attacked bloggers, and said they should be hanged. He did. At least if we’re to trust this post.

One wonders how much these blog posts hurt his business, but one thing is for sure – it’s hurting IIPM’s reputation far more than these blog posts did.